Europe’s high-stakes weedkiller decision goes to the wire

Talks on renewing glyphosate’s license in Europe are set to move into a tense 11th-hour endgame after EU countries failed to agree a compromise Wednesday on the widely used weedkiller.

Farmers and agrichemical companies had hoped that a meeting of EU national experts in Brussels would yield some certainty about the future of a herbicide that they argue is vital to maintaining bumper crops of everything from wheat to onions.

As expected, influential countries such as France, Italy, Austria and Belgium killed off the Commission’s proposal to renew glyphosate’s license for 10 years in an informal vote. The next stage of the meeting, however, then exposed unexpectedly stark divisions over the prospect of a shorter renewal.

One of the biggest strategic problems looming over the glyphosate debacle is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while herself supportive of a renewal, has been hamstrung by talks on forming a coalition government with the Greens, who oppose it.

Boxed in by the political ructions, the delegates in Wednesday’s meeting failed to build consensus for a seven-year, five-year or even three-year renewal, sending shockwaves through Europe’s farming community, which argues there are no alternatives.

The effective ban suggested by France and Belgium is a nightmare scenario for farmers and the chemical industry.

Countries will make another attempt to find a consensus in early November, only weeks before glyphosate’s license expires on December 15.

The pesticide, which is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s blockbuster Roundup weedkiller and is widely used with genetically modified crops globally, raced to the top of the EU political agenda in May 2015 after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded it “is probably carcinogenic to humans.” Two EU agencies, however, subsequently deemed it safe.

The effective ban suggested by France and Belgium is a nightmare scenario for farmers and the chemical industry.

The European Parliament is pushing for a five-year phase-out of glyphosate and many lawmakers suggested such a course was the only way to break the impasse revealed by Wednesday’s opaque decision-making process — known in Brussels as comitology.

“You can see where there is a democratic deficit in the institutions: in comitology, which is the black magic of the European decision-making process,” said Pavel Poc, a Socialist MEP from the Czech Republic who serves as vice chair of the Parliament’s environmental committee.

“We are calling on the Commission to include a phase-out in their proposal,” he added. “The only feasible compromise is the one we propose and we honestly don’t understand why they do not present it to countries.”

Pete Collings, lead economist at Oxford Economics, a consultancy that has conducted lengthy independent research on the impact of a ban on glyphosate with funding from the European Crop Protection Association (ECPA), an industry body, said farmers have no Plan B that is as cheap or as effective. “The research shows that given the current alternatives available … the impact on farming will be considerable,” he said.

A farm in Weelde, Belgium | Kristof van Accom/AFP via Getty Images

If the Commission fails to secure the required majority for a renewal in comitology, the decision will fall to President Jean-Claude Juncker. He has repeatedly said he is sick of countries letting Brussels take the blame for toxic decisions concerning matters such as genetically-modified crops.

One way that that scenario could be avoided is that the countries could agree a compromise of a three-year renewal. Diplomats said Germany aired that idea Wednesday and France was open to it. Several diplomats said they could not agree on a three-year option because they did not have a mandate from their capitals.

Graeme Taylor, director of public affairs at ECPA, which represents companies such as Bayer and Monsanto, said a 15-year license would have been granted if countries followed scientific evidence.

“Science is now being traded away in a high-stakes game of political roulette to decide how long an approval the substance should be granted,” he said.